Thomas D. Elias

Recent articles

Columns

On June 25, just one week before many California motorists began paying upwards of $4.30 per gallon for gasoline, the Bahamian-flagged tanker Teesta Spirit left Los Angeles headed for ports on the west coast of Mexico carrying more 300,000 barrels of gasoline refined in California.The Teesta Spirit was just one of nine large tankers that left California ports carrying gasoline to places like Mexico and Chile between June 25 and July 23, at a time when oil companies were raising prices...

Columns

There is no need — at least not yet — for total abandonment of the humane aspects of the immigration “sanctuary” laws now on the books in 276 American cities, counties and states. But in the wake of the seemingly random murder of a 32-year-old woman on San Francisco’s touristy Pier 14, not far from the landmark Ferry Building, there is surely a need for new sanity in sanctuary policies.What’s done now ought to reflect the spirit of a letter...

Columns

As Donald Trump, real estate mogul, TV star and Republican presidential candidate, made a whirlwind mid-July trip around the West in his private, blue-painted Boeing 767 jet, it almost seemed like he was trying to sabotage his own party. This was before he went off on the military record of the GOP icon, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.It’s been 21 years since Trump’s party mate, ex-Gov. Pete Wilson, campaigned for re-election against illegal immigrants, his TV commercials...

Columns

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.”— Robert Burns in his 1785 poem “To a Mouse”Bobby Burns couldn’t have known it, but as California approaches what many experts forecast to be the worst wildfire season on record, his description of how good intentions can go awry, not always turning out as planned, might come into play here soon.Nothing but good intentions were contained in last year’s...

Columns

Water flows downhill. It’s a basic reality now playing out 500 feet below the surface of California’s farmland everywhere from the fertile Central Valley to the citrus orchards of Riverside and San Diego counties.But it’s a physical fact to which government so far pays no apparent heed. That’s one big reason crops from Valencia oranges to nectarines, Santa Rosa plums and both yellow and white peaches seem smaller than usual this year.Here’s...

Columns

“A foolish consistency,” the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted, “is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and no one has ever accused Gov. Jerry Brown of being small minded. So why be surprised when he completely reverses himself as he did the other day on vaccinations?Less than three years ago, Brown signed into law a plan allowing parents to place in public schools children who had not been vaccinated for diseases like polio, measles, mumps, smallpox...

Columns

It’s the same with the state Public Utilities Commission these days as with almost everything else: by the time state legislators notice something is a problem, things are so bad, so extreme, that other people and agencies have already acted.Just now, almost six months after state and federal investigators executed search warrants on the homes of former PUC President Michael Peevey and a since-fired Pacific Gas & Electric Co. executive for whom Peevey would apparently do...

Columns

Firm Republican opposition to tinkering of any kind with the 1978 Proposition 13 is one reason voters may get no chance next year to decide whether or not to tax commercial and industrial land and buildings more than residential property.“Very remote,” was how the state Senate’s GOP leader, Bob Huff, described the chances of even one Republican voting for a so-called “split roll” measure now being carried by two Democratic state senators.The...

Opinion

Few things gall California Republicans more than realizing they hold just 14 of this state’s 53 seats in Congress. That’s only 26 percent of California’s representatives, while the opposition Democrats, with a mere 14 percent more registered voters, hold 39 seats, or about 74 percent.The GOP had a big chance last year to remedy this, targeting vulnerable Democrats who won their offices by narrow margins in President Obama’s 2012 re-election...

Columns

Listen to water officials from Gov. Jerry Brown down to local officials and you’d think replacing lawns with drought-resistant plants or artificial turf is a pure good, no negatives involved.They know lawn replacement, often called “xeriscaping” because it can use cactuses and other desert plants, generally leads to at least a 30 percent cut in household water use.But you could read reports from the ongoing Women’s World Cup soccer tournament, where...